I wanted him to slide his hand up, cup my face, and show me he’d missed me. Instead, he pried my arms from his middle. “Not yet,” I begged.
“Lake, it’s too dangerous.”
I shoved him away, but he was so solid, I was the one who stumbled back. “It’s always too dangerous with you. Everything.” I curled my toes into the damp grass. “If it were up to you, I’d live in a padded room without access to anything.”
“Maybe,” he said. I thought I detected a small, almost imperceptible smile, but it was quickly replaced with a scowl. “And I don’t want you dressing that way. Earlier.”
The cut-off skirt and tiny top both thrilled and embarrassed me. Dad had made me feel like a prostitute, but the heated look in Manning’s eyes was the only thing that made sense to me in all of this. He still wanted me, and not just a little. “It seemed like you liked it,” I said lightly.
He wiped his temple with his sleeve despite the temperate night, then took a step back. “What would make you think that?”
For the first time in a while, I read his body language clearly. The outfit made him uncomfortable. In the house, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. A minute ago, it’d made him angry. Now, he was looking toward the house, scratching under his collar. All that because of a short skirt and heels. I shrugged. “I guess it was the face you made.”
“I didn’t make any face.” He backed away a little more but didn’t try to leave.
“What didn’t you like about it?” I asked. “Was it the skirt? Was it too short?”
“I . . . it . . .”
I leaned in a little. “What?”
“Never mind. Just don’t dress like that.”
“How am I supposed to know what you mean if you won’t tell me what you didn’t like?”
His demeanor shifted. With the set of his jaw came the same white-hot glare from earlier. It could’ve been passion as easily as it could’ve been hate. I was upsetting him, but I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.” He spoke slowly. “I said I didn’t want it.”
“Doesn’t it matter what I want?”
“No.”
And wasn’t that the truth? It was a good thing I wanted to go to USC, because it wasn’t like I had a choice. Dad would’ve made sure of it, just like Manning made sure I kept my mouth shut about his case, dressed like a pre-teen, and stayed away from him. I had no input about anything, and I was beginning to wonder if eighteen was just another number or if it’d actually mean a shift into adulthood. “I’m not sixteen anymore, Manning. I don’t even feel sixteen. You got older in there, and so did I.”
“Yeah? Did you?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was joking, and for a blissful moment, we’d turned back time. The weeks before his arrest, I’d lived for those moments when he’d teased me in his own subtle way. “Tell me, what’d you do while I was away? How’d you spend your days?”
“I told you everything in my letters.”
He frowned a little. “I want to hear it from you.”
“I ran a lot,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
There came a certain kind of peace once I pushed past the pain, the wheezing, the sweating. I had yet to find anything else that had gotten me there—except maybe the beer and joint I’d had with Corbin. “It helped.”
Closing his eyes, he said, “Me too.”
“You run?” I asked, straightening my back. We could run together, me and him, it could be our thing. He couldn’t say no to it, because it was something innocent and good.
But then he blinked a few times. “Nah. I mean physical activity. Labor. It helped me, too.”
“Oh. What else did you do? What else helped?”
He shook his head and trailed his eyes down my arm. “How’d you get the scar?”
“You know how.”
“No, I don’t, because I didn’t read your letters.”
My heart fell. “You never got them?”
“I got them. I just didn’t read them.”
Of all the scenarios I’d considered, that wasn’t one of them, especially since I’d have done anything to read even one letter from Manning while he’d been away. I’d spent hours of my life writing them, one of the only things outside of running that’d kept me sane. “Not even one?”
“You wasted your time.”
“Maybe I did,” I said, “but time never feels wasted on you.”
He swallowed, turning his face up to the sky. I loved when he did that, not just because the stars were ours, but because he exposed his strong, veiny throat to me. It made him, a man with callused palms and overpowering strength, seem vulnerable. “It was too hard.” He spoke quietly. Maybe it was easier for him to say when he didn’t have to look at me. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”